I thought you all might like to read this, that came in my email box this morning. Enjoy!Despite his initial cynicism Kevin Whately has found Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis to be a surprising hit. He and co-star Laurence Fox talk about the secret to its success.
Telegraph.co.uk 23rd April 2010 By Naomi West
‘Change’ may be the buzzword of the moment in political circles, but when it comes to entertainment there can be great value in consistency, in staying more or less the same. ‘Familiarity,’ says actor Kevin Whately when asked what he considers the appeal of ITV1’s Oxford-set detective drama Lewis, in which he plays the title role. ‘People have always liked it, so they carry on watching it.’
When Lewis returns to our screens next Sunday night, Whately, 59, will have been playing the steady police detective Robbie Lewis on and off for well over two decades. He had thought that he had seen the back of Lewis when he chose to appear in a play over participating in an episode of Morse in the late 1990s. But he was to be lured back to help conclude Inspector Morse’s story, opposite the much loved John Thaw as Morse, and then once more in 2006, four years after Thaw’s death, this time as the programmer’s title character.
‘I was a bit of a naysayer,’ Whately says of the time Lewis was mooted. ‘But it took off like a train so here we are back again…’ He gestures around his small beige caravan, during a break from filming.
This November morning, the crew is filming in Turl Street, a narrowish thoroughfare abutted by three of Oxford University’s colleges. Hanging around outside a coffee shop is the long-limbed, insouciant figure of Laurence Fox, 32, who plays Lewis’s side DS Hathaway. Fox is dressed in a sharp dark suit and overcoat (‘I try to steal as much of the wardrobe budget as possible,’ he says); the scene is an encounter between Hathaway and an aristocratic young woman who was a childhood crush. ‘At last, I’ve got a love interest that is not a transsexual who tries to murder me,’ laughs Fox.
The crew is as fleet-footed as a 20-or-so-strong group filming a major drama could be. In the chilly street, perfumed with the smell of lunchtime Bolognese from a nearby college kitchen, scores of pedestrians and cyclists pass through, untroubled by the activity. When the cameras start turning and the real students, townspeople and tourists are replaced by ‘background artists’ carefully choreographed to amble through the shot, the change is imperceptible (the only difference is that the extras are drabber than the occasionally flamboyant Oxford inhabitants).
‘It’s quite a guerrilla thing,’ Whately says of the city filming, though in the summer months, it proves harder not to cause a stir. ‘Especially because quite a lot of tourists have come to the city because they’ve seen Oxford in the Morse or the Lewis films.’
The casting of Fox as the brainy Hathaway opposite Whately’s down-to-earth Lewis has proved key to the sustained success of the drama (it attracted more than six million viewer’s last series and survived ITV’s budget cuts intact). Both undemonstrative, the two barely look at one another on-screen, but an engaging rapport has emerged. ‘It’s not necessarily written [in the script]… You can’t work on it. It’s either there or not,’ says Whately of their chemistry. Off-screen, Whately seems to take the role of a tolerant, if slightly disapproving uncle to the more waggish Fox. ‘I annoy him. He forgives me,’ is how Fox defines their relationship.
Both lead actors are equal in their lack of hunger for dramatic personal storylines for their characters. Fox, the son of actor James (Performance, Thoroughly Modern Millie) and nephew of Edward (The Day of the Jackal, Edward and Mrs. Simpson), is irritated by the fact that more details of Hathaway’s background are to be revealed in the forthcoming series. We already knew he used to be a trainee priest; now we’ll learn that he grew up on a country estate where his father was manager. ‘The less you know the more you care,’ he insists.
Whately argues that the drama works because the focus is not principally on the fortunes of Lewis and Hathaway, but on the murder case in each episode. ‘There is always a danger with a long-running series for it to disappear up its own a---, to become all about the regulars. Like hospital dramas where it’s the main characters getting ill. Here I’m very aware Lewis is the pivotal character, but the guests do all the acting.’ This series has pulled in a fine list of guest actors including Timothy West, Rupert Graves, Alan Davies, Diana Quick and Robert Hardy. ‘Thank God for the credit crunch,’ remarks Fox. ‘We’ve got some great people.’
As for the storylines, Fox says that this is ‘the best year yet’ – they take in a violent shooting on a country estate, a Halloween murder foreseen by a medium and a primary school teacher killed during a college-based quiz weekend. Fox remarks that in the past the far-fetched narratives could become ‘the elephant in the room’ during shoots.
They seem to have hit an enjoyable groove making this series. Fox became an exhausted new father while the previous series was filming; this time one-year-old Winston and actress wife Billie Piper have been ‘coming to visit loads’ since filming began back in July. During breaks he has taken to fishing in the Thames where it flows past the coach park where the film unit is based. Fox even insists on conducting his publicity interviews on the riverbank, rod in one hand, liquorice roll-up in the other. ‘We’re always filming near pretty places, so I’m not going to sit in the hutch all day,’ he says, referring to his trailer.
Brutal and imaginative murders aside, the world of Lewis and Hathaway is a convivial and attractive place to be, and one that looks unlikely to change any time soon.
